Reviving a Belmont Shore Spanish Revival

PHOTO by ZACK PIANKO

When Mark Estrada was a kid in ’60s-era Rowland Heights, developers had just begun to harvest a bumper crop of tract homes from L.A. and Orange County farmland. He went to work for a lumber company in Corona, a city where “Spanish Revival” means a suburban tract home with an arch out front and a Taco Bell up the street. That lumber company moved him to Long Beach where, within a short time, Estrada managed the Signal Hill Home Depot.

Then Estrada bent time—went to work at a B & B Hardware store (the one at Redondo and Fourth) where he says he’s been “exposed to the significance of Long Beach’s historical homes.”

B & B specializes in vintage hardware—doorknobs, windows, sinks, porcelain fixtures and more. Working there, he says, has “really awakened a passion to restore these places to their former glory.”

Estrada says this during a talk about one of those homes, a Belmont Shore Spanish Revival.

Estrada likes the high, coved ceilings typical of the Spanish Revival. He’s seen some around town where the open beams are like rings on trees, each generation of homeowners leaving its autobiography in some detail of the woodwork, even “delicate, filigreed carvings.”

The Belmont Shore home in question, built in 1926, belongs to John and Mareen Rossbach, a computer guy and a sales executive with Fortune 100 firms. They’re determined to maintain the look of a house closing in on its centennial while making some important upgrades—starting with the windows. “Living near the beach here, the old wood ones were just rotting away,” says John.

The originals were very cool swing-out French casement windows—think French doors made of glass and wood, but (here’s the key) without a center mull. When both sides of each 5-by-4-foot window were open, the Rossbachs had more than lots of air and a great view: “We’ve got this weird little jog in our entryway, so the windows were the only way to get really big stuff—like furniture—in and out of the house.”

The couple asked Estrada for help. While he searched for French-casement windows, the project blossomed—from three windows to seven or eight, and then into something completely new and different: an upstairs deck with room for a fireplace, barbecue and spa.

They were undaunted. Pioneering neighbors had built already similar decks with breathtaking results, John says: “We’d go up to their decks, and they’d have these great views and real quiet.”

The recent storms were an unpleasant surprise with rain pelting down like gravel and whip-cracking tarps, but John says no, just a couple of small leaks and reasonable delays, really, all of it diminished by the certainty that this spring they’ll have a deck that adds about 325 square feet of livable outside space—a real complement to the promise of Long Beach living, a place where the first Spanish Revival captured balmy year-round weather indoors. Even if it had to come in through the window.

Tags: belmont shore, Long Beach, Shelter, spanish revival